


Those Formative Years

by Missy



Category: Pretty Good Year - Tori Amos (Song)
Genre: Break Up, Cheating, Dark, Domestic Violence, F/F, F/M, Jealousy, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Not Happy, Relationship Disintegration, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 00:24:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1798762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hold on to nothing as fast as you can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Formative Years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Katherine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/gifts).



> Written For Jukebox '14 for Katherine. Thank you to Red Fiona for betaing this!
> 
> Tori originally wrote the song this is based on about one about a guy who wrote her a letter. He was 23, droopy and a little sad according to the drawing he enclosed, and as Tori tells it in the Rhapsody in Pink bootleg, he said to her: ‘look. ya know, I don’t know what you girls expect of us. i mean, i can’t figure it out. you know, first you want us to be a provider and then once we do that, we’ve gotta take like art classes on Thursday nights. and then you like, you gotta cum four times first. and then we have to like have the quiche in the oven, you know. and I don’t know what you want!’ Tori's response?: ‘guys, I know it’s really rough, but no pity.'

Lucy Applewhite is eighteen years old when she meets him. She’ll always remember the time and place, even when she’s a hundred years old; feel the hard, sharp shock of it run up her spine like a cat’s claw. They’re standing in the rain waiting for the five into Newell Station. A skinny, tall man wearing John Lennon spectacles offers her his yellow umbrella. She thinks he’s God and he’s il-obliged to disagree.

He lingers by her in the station and on the train, enchanting her with his talk, chanting the names of the devils and saints that characterize his rebellious life. They form a humming mantra in the back of her mind, broadening her narrow, bourgeois consciousness - Dvorak, Brodsky and Thatcher. She seems to float behind him, exiting the Tube at his shoulder and bobbing in the sunlight, throbbing yellow in the canvas of gray.

She lets him take her home, and they split a taxi ride to domesticity. 

At her shared flat she pours apple spice tea into cheap plastic cups. The past spills forth from his lips in torrents; he plays tennis, he studies Russian, his passion is chamber music played upon the piano. He takes note of the shabby, dim place and tells her she deserves more – she should be on the Riviera, in Rome, in the wilds of Australia – anywhere but York Street. He sees her viola propped like a sacrifice against her hope chest and suddenly grows passionate - he’s a composer, and he has a duet for keys and strings that could be adapted just for them, if he took enough care with it. He finally starts asking her about herself and she’s tongue-tied and foolish, stammering for an answer; she manages to tell him where she goes to school and his eyes light up - he’s in the same school, and the same chorale she’s just applied to join. Isn’t fate beautiful? She’s a soloist with promise, and some childish part of her fantasizes instantly about a life touring the world at his side, a ravishing equal and yet a hardworking helpmate for his endless adventures abroad. 

The raspberry stain spreads along the blue rim as she smiles.

*** 

They move in together after a few months - for the sake of convenience, and because her lease is almost up, though she knows that it’s really because she’s an enormous fan of taking the easy way out and her roommate is positively beastly and also quite likely to replace her. But for now all is tranquility and bliss; for now there’s nothing more ambitious than a four-room flat with a piano and a viola, two marmalade cats, and a shared bus pass.

Lucy had fallen in love with a genius, but geniuses can be a complex lot. It doesn’t take her long to recognize the dark side of his personality, to learn about his nasty habits and obsessions. He’s fond of blasting the local columnists in the free dallies with salvos of angry and poorly researched opinions about the establishment, the economy and the way the trains run. Greg’s favorite haunt is the music section; inferior reviews of superior albums tend to send him into wild rages. This extends into the real world, to record stores and pubs, to the weak and boldly-shouted opinions of his friends. There Lucy can make herself a helpmeet, coax him off the ledge with tea and toast and humor. But his bouts of unmannered anger are frequent and leave her shaking and teary-eyed even though they’re never directed at her.

At school he’s there too – walking from class to class with his sad, haunted eyes, occupying the other end of the stage while she saws away at her instrument. There they seem to exist on opposite ends of a looking glass, and she can’t breach the membrane of mirror. She quickly learns of the depth of his paranoia when she takes his umbrella with her to a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark and loses it on the sticky floor of the cinema. He hounds their phone lines with demands and entreaties until the thing’s found and returned to him. 

It’s the first time Lucy’s stood in the eye of Greg’s hurricane, and it’s a position she doesn’t want to inhabit again. While the storm blows over, she is haunted, thoughts souring her cooking, coloring the potato peelings and deepening the inflections of the voices of the TV announcers. She curls away from him in bed, wrapping herself against the furry heat of the slumbering cats. 

***

Lucy’s not completely conscious of it, but she’s already started to move on from Greg and their cats and their unfinished symphony. Anything might have shoved her over the edge into an affair – a missed phone call, or a chance meeting in a coffee shop. In her case it was a mass invitation sent to the entire chorale offering a meeting with a professor of music theory summering at the college for tea. 

All she has to do is walk into a room and she feels it – the radiant warmth of the visiting woman, as alien to the austere fixtures surrounding her as a clown in a graveyard. 

There is simply something about her - the funny shape of her lips, the way her hair falls in a cloud of flames around her face. And especially the way she talks about music. 

Lucy didn’t mean for it to happen. But the Eternal Footman is at play anyway.

She goes home with Tori that night 

**** 

Greg comes home to disarray. The cats’ box hasn’t been cleaned, dishes covered with congealed food rot in the sink and his girlfriend lies sprawled upon the couch, snoring away. A chastened Lucy wakens to a clean house and instantly starts makes an excuse, talking about finals, telling him how long she’s been studying and how tired she is. She needs to be at the library early. He takes up the cooking, grumbling that this isn’t what he had in mind when he imagined partaking of an equal relationship. 

Lucy makes use of the tension – she composes. 

Greg broods instead. And after one too many a late night he follows her after the library closes to a pub.

When he discovers Tori sitting boldly beside the woman he loves, there’s an ugly quarrel.

Lucy pulls them apart, once more the mediator. There are apologies she doesn’t really mean, and Tori puts them both into a taxi, afraid to let them get on a bus. Halfway home, Greg unloads on his girlfriend. The relationship doesn’t survive the fight. 

He corners Lucy as she packs to leave, telling her that there’ll be no one else who’ll ever make her feel as alive as he does. He blames it all on Tori. “That girl,” he says, eyes sharp as knives, “is a problem.” His index finger presses the tip of Lucy’s nose in a childish, taunting way.

“Stop.”

“I’m not even touching you.”

“I told you to stop,” Lucy growls, shoving away his propitious touch. He shakes her then, hard and sharp, and she pushes him away, dashing off and away.

When he looks back over his shoulder for some sign of Lucy she’s a vapor trail, a mirage. 

The Eternal Footman peddles on, leaving pestilence and rancid fear in his wake.

*** 

The recriminations afterward are almost clichéd. The trial separation. The separate apartments. The arguments over the cats’ custody. A terrible beach trip that does nothing to reconcile them. He keeps the apartment and she moves in with Tori.

His best friend moves in, to share the rent and all but nurse Greg through the breakup. Long nights filled with booze end in bittersweet exchanges of memory.

“Lucy was so pretty,” is the refrain.

His best friend can do nothing but agree.

***

After graduation, Lucy manages to secure a job as a governess with a top-ranking military official, and her Pepsodent smile wins her hundreds of friends. Tori plays dive bars all night and comes home smelling of Winstons and spilled Micholobes. They’re too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, but there’s hot soup and cool drinks, and the comfort they find in each other’s company.

The fight is worth it, in the end. Tori finally composes a popular sonata that secures her a position with an orchestra. She works her way toward conductorhood while Lucy plays in the orchestra.

It would have been paradise, but for Greg, the specter of their lives. He may have lost direct contact privileges with Lucy (restraining orders will do that), but on the internet anybody can have their say. He trolls reviews for Tori’s albums, stalks their Facebook, prods them on MySpace, leaves terrible reviews for public recitals. There’s nearly nothing to be done about it. He’ll resent Tori for the rest of his life; her ease and intelligence like acid to his confidence. He sees in her the promise he could have never realized and it’s killing him to the quick. 

Tori and Lucy have no option but to stick together. They’re happily unhappy, almost manically, violently attached to each other but never entirely comfortable.

If only the surface reflected anything other than perfection.

*** 

He sees Lucy one more time, over a wobbly wooden table at an album signing. It’s the afternoon before she plays with the Philharmonic, and his best friend has tried to take him out of town before he violates his orders – but instead Greg’s slipped away to confront them both and purge the poison of their happiness from his bloodstream. 

The twelfth person in line, he watches their expressions change when he comes into view. He sees Lucy’s fingers tighten against the table, turning pure white with fear. And Tori’s perfect eyes dart about in her head as she makes out the disc in his name.

Her fingers sweat against the plastic – and they slip when he leans in to whisper as she hands him the disc. “They say you were something in those formative years,” he says. “I was there, I would know, wouldn’t I?”

Her smile is sphinxlike. The disc glides across the table and back into Greg’s sweaty palms. “Be well.”

He tells her he’s off to America in the summer – on an exchange program with the Russians. Lucy smiles thinly and wishes him a safe trip, knowing it was nonsense, knowing he wasn’t in school anymore.

“Hold on to nothing,” he tells her. “As fast as you can.” His eyes pierce Lucy’s pinched face as his friend pulls him away.

At night, Greg sets the CD on fire. At night, he dreams about ripping her into bloody bits, into tiny specs of dust with hummingbird-trill voices. He’ll tell his best friend later that she seemed so peaceful, so smug.

Then he’s alone. 

He does his tears in private and takes up his pen.

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction uses characters from **Pretty Good Year** , all of whom are the property of **Tori Amos**. No money was gained from the writing of this fanfiction and all are used under the strictures of of the Berne Convention.


End file.
